Mary Roach on the surreal science of after-market human parts

Spring-loaded dentures. Vaginas crafted from intestines. A 3D-printed heart valve pumping away inside a mouse. These are just a few of the innovations — historic and modern-day — Mary Roach details with her trademark wit in Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy as she explores the many ways humans cope with failing or unflattering body parts. 

The author of best-sellers such as Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex will be in Boulder on Wednesday, Sept. 9 to discuss and sign her latest book, out now in paperback. 

We sat down with the Bay Area resident, 67, to talk prosthetics, pubic wigs and the surreal science of after-market human body parts.

Did reporting and writing this book  change your relationship to your body? Are you looking at any particular part and thinking, ‘Oh, I need to take better care of this, because replacing it is quite an ordeal’?

 Just, you know, all of them. Because whatever replacement — I mean, there's some amazing advancements in trying to create a substitute for what you were born with, but as far as I can tell, it’s never quite gonna be as good as what you were born with.

I remember thinking, "I have thin bones, but so what?” Because you can just replace a joint, easy-peasy, which you can. But I've seen that operation and if I could avoid going through that … 'cause it's like power equipment. It's like a pretty intense surgery. 

I should be lifting weights and doing whatever I can to keep my hips from breaking.  And am I doing it? I'm not. I never learn anything, really, from my books.  I do intellectually, but do I actually change my life based on what I've learned? No. 

You tackle pretty disgusting topics with curiosity and humor.  In reporting this book, did anything ever cross the line from fascinating to horrifying?

It's pretty hard to get me to that point. I've only once in my whole career, actually had to leave the room, like gagged. And that wasn't even for reporting. I knew someone who's a medical examiner and I think she made it a personal goal of hers to make Mary Roach gag. 

So she's like, "Oh, we have an interesting case at the morgue today. You should come down." I did, like an idiot. It was a body that had been decomposing in a hot room for a while. You do an autopsy, you cut that body open, and a lot of smells come out. I was out of there fast. 

 What skeeved me out a little bit was the tissue donation you observed.

It's not something you're used to seeing, you know, a body sort of taken apart. But so amazing the way they put everything back together. Other than the stitching, you would have no idea that  this person had donated bones, ligaments, fascia, skin. 

 Maybe it was the leg being sliced open and the bones removed that got me. And particularly the line when you wrote they make fake, extendable leg bones to put back in, because a body would be too hard to move without stiff legs. 

 There's this book by Ray Bradbury, about this guy [who] picks up a woman in a bar, and her hair falls over like half her face. And he gets home with her, and then she pulls back the hair, and there's this thing that comes out and it sucks his bones out through his mouth. And then the last line was describing him as like a jellyfish on the floor because there's no more bones. 

Without the bones, you'd be like one of those floppy roadside windsock people.

But worse because you're wet. Like just a wet windsock. 

You're definitely moist. I think that in situations like that or the body farm from Stiff, what you're seeing slash smelling is kind of overwhelming, but it's outweighed by how interesting what you're learning is, at least for me. 

 Were there some parts of this book that you enjoyed reporting on more than others? 

 The trip to Tbilisi to track down that surgeon who rebuilt a man's penis using the man's own middle finger. No matter what happened, that was gonna be an interesting chapter. Mongolia also, just because Mongolia. The intraocular lens cataract surgery chapter was super interesting. You don't have to go to Mongolia to write a chapter about cataract surgery. If you set it in Mongolia, whatever it is, it's probably gonna be more interesting. 

The hair transplant chapter. The history of hair transplants and getting the guy to transplant some hair from my head to my leg to see if I could grow long, flowing hair on my calf. That was a lot of fun. The iron lung. Being in an iron lung for however short a time, a working iron lung, was really fascinating.

 I'm so sorry your leg hair transplant didn't take. I was really bummed for you. 

I was so disappointed. I really was. There were a couple days where I'm like, "Oh, is that it?”

I was disappointed to learn that merkins (pubic wigs) weren't real, or at least not in the popular sense we thought they were perhaps. 

I was too. I can't prove that there weren't any, but there's not references other than in certain literary contexts. If they were making jokes about them in literature from the 1500s, 1600s, perhaps they did. 

It didn't make a whole lot of sense, 'cause you're not gonna fool anybody with some fake patch of hair that you've stuck on there with the equivalent of Elmer's glue from the 1500s. But I was hoping to find some kind of evidence, some sort of document. But according a wig historian — the closest I could find to a merkin [expert] — I couldn't really pin it down. Unless, of course, you're in a play or in a film. Making it for an actor, a pubic hair piece, those do exist. I guess you would call that a merkin. 

Is there any part of your body you wouldn’t replace if you lost it?

 If I lost my lower arm, based on what I know about those prosthetics with the cyborg fingers —  how heavy they are, how limiting they are, and also how much you can do with just a residual limb plus your mouth or your other hand — I would not opt for one of those hands.

Is there any part of your body you would replace voluntarily, even if you didn’t need to?

 If it was a hassle-free and side effect-free replacement, I'd just replace my neck, my chin — just, like, from under the nose down to the collarbone.  You hit my age, and it just all starts to fall.

Favorite footnote of this book? 

 I'm kind of fond of the Hitler's mustache one. Everyone calls it a Hitler mustache, but it predated Hitler. It was called the toothbrush mustache. Hitler's dentist had a toothbrush mustache. So he didn't start it. He kind of ended it. 

Favorite research paper title from this book?

“How to Make a New Nose for Someone When It's Off Entirely, and the Dog Has Eaten It,” by Heinrich Von Pfalzpaint.

Now that I know ____, I’ll never look at ____ the same way again

Now that I know that half-and-half is useful in certain circumstances as a douche, I won't look at half-and-half quite the same. 

 If you build a vagina for either someone who's had cancer or a trans woman, and you use a piece of the intestine as your neo-vagina, it helps to douche with half-and-half. I forget what is in half-and-half that makes it helpful, but that's what the surgeon recommends. So a carton of half-and-half has taken on new meaning for me.

ON THE PAGE: Mary Roach, Replaceable You, hosted by Boulder Bookstore. 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9, First Congregational Church, 1128 Pine St. Boulder. $14